Develop an Audience Strategy for Your Blog and Blogged Book

As you set out to blog your book, or even to create a blog to promote yourself as an author or to build a business around your book, answer one primary question: Why?

If you want your book or your blog—or your business—to succeed, the answer to this question should have little to do with you. Instead, it should have everything to do with your audience, or your potential readers.

The Organizing Principle

During New Media Expo in Las Vegas in January, consumer behavior specialist Tom Webster explained that every blog needs an organizing principle. “That principle is not about a ‘what’ but about a ‘why,’” he said.

That means you must figure out the reason people would read your blog or your book.

I’ve always stressed that before you begin blogging or writing a book, you have to know your market. That also means knowing your ideal reader. However, a book, or a blog, could have several markets. According to Webster, “You might have several groups with different ‘whys’ but somewhere there is a joint ‘why.’”

You have to find the place where all the segments of your potential audience converge and determine the reason they would want to read your blog or your book, or, ultimately, to purchase anything from you. “You have to know why people buy or don’t buy your brand,” Webster said.

As an author and a blogger, you are a brand.

Your Content Strategy

There’s lots of talk in the blogosphere about content strategy. Bloggers and those who sell anything online, including coaches, authors and speakers, don’t like to talk about internet marketing anymore; instead they talk about content marketing. If you want to sell something—even a book—from your blog, you are supposed to have a “content strategy.”

Kristina Halvorson, the author of Content Strategy for the Web and the founder of the Confab content strategy conference defines content strategy a “planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.”

Indeed, every blog and blogger needs a content strategy. And that strategy must focus on the ‘why.’ Why would anyone want to read your blog? Why would anyone want to buy (i.e. read) your book? Why would anyone want to purchase your products and services?

Your Audience Strategy

Your content strategy must reflect your audience strategy. “Audience strategy supersedes content strategy,” said Webster. This is how you plan to target that audience, how you plan to answer the “why” for them in everything you do, including through the content you produce. And your content strategy must be “audience focused” rather than “buyer focused.”

Stop putting your attention simply on getting your ideal readers or customers to purchase. Instead, to accomplish this end goal, Webster suggested first focusing on the values, beliefs, attitudes, personality, interests, needs, wants, and desires of the people in your audience—your ideal readers and customers. Then, he said, plan for “the creation, delivery and governance of exceptional” audience-driven content that does one of three things:

Challenges your readers

Entertains you readers

Is based upon your expertise, and, therefore, showcases your authority in a subject area

If you do this while addressing the “why,” you’ll gain more readers—potential buyers—each time you publish a post.

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About Nina Amir

Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, inspires writers to create published products and careers as authors as well as to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose and potential. She is the author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual, both published by Writer’s Digest Books. A developmental editor, proposal consultant, author and book and blog-to-book coach, some of her clients have sold 230,000+ copies of their books and been published by major publishing houses. A popular speaker and workshop leader, she writes four blogs, has self-published 12 books and is the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month, also known as the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge.

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